Sometimes strange characters will appear on sites created with iWeb when distributed from an Microsoft IIS web server. Though this problem is purported to be fixable by changing the encoding settings of the web server, if one looks at the code that iWeb writes, there are tags that contain nothing but these ASCII characters that do not appear when distributed by a Mac OS or Linux Apache server, but do display on Windows IIS servers. Follow the steps below to easily remove these unnecessary tags.

Steps

1

Using iWeb, publish your site to a folder on your computer.

2

Make a copy of this folder in another location as a backup.

3

Do a Google search for "TextWrangler" and download version 2.1 or higher from a reputable source.

4

Install TextWrangler on your Macintosh.

5

Launch TextWrangler.

6

View your iWeb site in a browser to find the pages that have the unwanted characters. They usually look like an "A" with a wavy line over it.

7

When you find a page with these characters, look in the browser address bar to determine the name of the page (like Welcome.html or Archive.html). Notice if the page is in a folder and the name of that folder so you can find it in the folder on your computer.

8

In TextWrangler, use File - Open to load that page from the site folder that you published to your computer.

9

Select Text - Zap Gremlins to open the Zap Gremlins window.

10

Keep the default options and click "Zap" to delete the offending ASCII codes.

11

Use File - Save to save your new page over your old one.

12

Close the page.

13

Repeat the previous five steps for any page that displays unwanted ASCII characters.

14

Rename the current site folder on your web server to something else to keep it as a backup.

15

Upload the folder with your "zapped" files to your web server. Use the same name for the folder as before.

16

Reload (refresh) the pages in your web browser to make sure the characters have been removed.